Black Thumb

I have now officially been present for the fucking-up of my third expensive piece of technology in less than a month.

First it was my (just past warranty) cell phone, which went “waah” and died in Atlanta. Then, I returned from Atlanta to find my (expensive, name-brand, just past warranty) DVD player going “ch ch ch ch ch” and refusing to read discs.

Last night, I got the Blue Screen of Death when I tried to load up my Dell laptop.

It had worked fine in the afternoon, but when I went to check email before I went to bed last night, it loaded up very slowly and immediately froze. When I did ctrl-alt-del, I got the first blue screen, the one that said, “If this has never happened to you before, restart your computer and see how that goes.” Which I did. And then I got the Total and Complete Blue Screen of Death, the one talking about a corrupt registry and physical memory dumps and contacting my system administrator.

But the system administrator is, well, me.

It won’t start in safe mode. It won’t start with last known good configuration. It just stares bluely at me. My formerly tech-support mom took a look at it and declared it dead, and her tech-support friends confirmed it. So now I have to decide whether I want to spend $69 on software that would help me recover my files if I take the hard drive out of the laptop and get an adaptor-thingie and connect it to our desktop, and then spend a day or a week trying to make that happen, or I can say “fuck it” and just start reinstalling everything, dumping my mp3s and most of my web design files and my saved IMs and assorted writings.

I’m having a rough day so far today and the “fuck it” option is looking better than ever, not just for this but for everything.

I don’t know, maybe if I were on the South Beach Diet things wouldn’t seem so bad.

South Beath would just make it worse because you’d be like, “I HAVE A DEAD COMPUTER AND I’VE ONLY EATEN HALF A GRAPEFRUIT ALL DAY AGGGHHH!” and now I’m feeling SO much better about NOT going Dell like I almost did. If nothing else, you’ve made me feel better, and isn’t that worth something?

There are times that the gadgets that have been deigned by advertisers to make us happier end up doing just the opposite. And when they do it in close proximity to one another (because they are going to do it sooner or later anyway), then we feel frustration, especially when we’ve spent many hours at work just to earn these happy gadgets. Which leads us to’ what IS supposed to make us content and fulfilled? I look forward to your perspective on this, if you decide to share such with us.

As far as the diet goes, being on SB (after phase 1) might just give you enough positive news that would counterbalance all the bad engendered by the happy gadgets. Of course, if you were on most any other diet that constricted caloric intake, your irritability would probably be worse.

Hey lorie, how do you feel about the technocrap all failing you? huh? Tell us already! You know, post something that gives us the nitty gritty about what’s goin’ on inside when, say the Dell dies. Title the post, oh, I don’t know, perhaps something like, “Black Thumb” associating the metaphor for someone who is gifted with seeding and nurturing plants and turning the phrase to connote DEATH.
Make sure it’s clear to us that the things you worked for to aid in the joy in your life only caused you pain and heartache. (Some of us might not get it if you’re not Absolutely Clear.)
At the end you can share with us your feelings of wanting to just give up on all of it – AND THEN, give a hint that lets us know the gadgetDeaths have got you feeling like you wanna just give up on e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g…

Hey, and listen to me know, before you go and write that post – Before you do it – be sure you maintain your calories and don’t get any more irritable ’cause, you know, anything could come along like a wasp in your pants to sting you on the crotch and
just
make
everything
worse.